Robotic fingers made of soft material and compliant structures usually lead
to superior adaptation when interacting with the unstructured physical
environment. In this paper, we present an embedded sensing solution using
optical fibers for an omni-adaptive soft robotic finger with exceptional
adaptation in all directions. In particular, we managed to insert a pair of
optical fibers inside the finger's structural cavity without interfering with
its adaptive performance. The resultant integration is scalable as a versatile,
low-cost, and moisture-proof solution for physically safe human-robot
interaction. In addition, we experimented with our finger design for an object
sorting task and identified sectional diameters of 94\% objects within the
±6mm error and measured 80\% of the structural strains within ±0.1mm/mm
error. The proposed sensor design opens many doors in future applications of
soft robotics for scalable and adaptive physical interactions in the
unstructured environment.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, full-length version of a submission to IEEE
RoboSoft 202